USB audio problems on FRS touchscreen stereo

[nextcar]

Hope this helps someone...

I copied about 23 GB of audio files to a USB drive for use in my FRS with the touchscreen stereo unit and was VERY dissatisfied with the results...

The system would "freeze", scrolling was intermittent, ID3 tag data would not be displayed sometimes... When it worked it was great but it didn't work long.

I did some investigation and changed two things that made a world of difference. Now the system no longer freezes, scrolling always works, no more problems with ID3 tags, and startup is near instantaneous. I do not know which of the two changes (or both) were the real fix.

First I found that at some point the MP3 files were on a Macintosh system, and that there were hidden stub files for a resource fork. So if a song file was called "mymusic.mp3" there was also a hidden 4 kilobyte file called "._mymusic.mp3" present for many of the songs. I deleted all of these.

Second I used a utility called "EasyTAG" to fix all the ID3 tags and rewrite them in version 2.4 format.

The takeaway is that if you are having problems with MP3 playback working well on your stock stereo, be aware that it does not do a good job of error recovery if it sees data it does not understand...

Good luck!

[Spoonie_XL]

That did the trick! Thank you!